Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (95 page)

Over a whisky with Denis and Robin Butler, Margaret Thatcher suddenly said: ‘Robin, that young man who asked the question about the word illegitimate – he had a point didn’t he?’
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The episode highlighted three aspects of Margaret Thatcher’s personality. First, her sometimes insensitive forthrightness. Second, her reluctance to yield, let alone apologise for, a bad point. Third, her willingness to learn from a mistake.

‘I will wager she never used the word illegitimate again’, said Robin Butler.
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The written word became a major preoccupation to Margaret Thatcher after she signed a £3.5 million deal with Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house, HarperCollins, for the world rights to her memoirs. The first volume,
The Downing Street Years
, took only eighteen months to write. Completing the gargantuan task of covering her entire premiership in such a short time meant that she had to rely too heavily on her team of ghost writers, who included Robin Harris, a former director of the Conservative Research Department; John O’Sullivan of the
Daily Telegraph
; and Christopher Collins, a young Oxford academic. But parts of this somewhat stilted autobiography bear the unmistakable stance of her personality and style. In particular, the Falklands chapters are such a vivid account of the conflict that they could only have been written by herself.

Margaret Thatcher did not enjoy the literary process. She was at best a reluctant author. However, she well understood the importance of setting down her testament of history, and as a result her book shows many traces of self-serving revisionism – a common weakness among writers of political memoirs!

By the time she got round to the second volume,
The Path to Power
, the failings of stiltedness and an excess of amanuenses were even more apparent. Charles Moore, her official biographer, perceptively noted that the two volumes of her memoirs ‘could never quite overcome the problem that they were the autobiography of someone who did not think autobiographically’.
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Such a mind-set leaves all the more scope for her biographers. But she was not thinking of them either at the time when she was working on her memoirs. For she was a woman who infinitely preferred action to authorship. She wanted to stay in the arena where her passions and prejudices were focused. As a
result, she stirred up a lot of action and argument on the stage of contemporary politics throughout the years 1990–1997, much to the chagrin of her party and her successor as prime minister.

LAST MONTHS AS A MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT

Even when she was working on her memoirs, Margaret Thatcher was determined to fulfil her duties as an elected Member of the House of Commons. The readjustment process from the life of a prime minister to the life of a back-bencher was not easy.

The problem of not having a Commons office was solved by Archie Hamilton vacating his far from spacious junior minister’s room. It was the first of his many acts of kindness towards her. Over the next few years, Ann and Archie Hamilton regularly invited Denis and Margaret to stay for long weekends, Easters and Christmases at Rhyll Manor, their country house in Devon. Their kindness was a major boon to both Thatchers, as was the similar hospitality they received from another parliamentary couple, Michael and Susan Forsyth.

Peter Morrison was fading in health and diligence as a notional PPS. Margaret Thatcher let him down gently. She never criticised him publicly or privately for his disastrous handling of her leadership election campaign. He never reproached himself for it either. They were both in denial. Although the blame gaming of her betrayers became tedious, her loyalty to Morrison was exemplary. Fidelity to old friends was one of her most admirable qualities.

New friends came into her parliamentary life. There were two identifiable Thatcher followings among Tory back-benchers. They were the Eurosceptics, particularly the Conservative European Reform Group run by Teddy Taylor, and the right-of-centre No Turning Back group run by Gerald Howarth.

Margaret Thatcher seemed to be suffering not only from withdrawal symptoms over her loss of power but from guilt feelings about her failure not to have recognised early enough that the Delors vision of the EEC was posing a growing threat to Britain’s economic and political well-being. So, in her last months as an MP she spent much time in receiving briefings from two back-benchers whom many of their colleagues described as ‘completely mad’ about Europe – Teddy Taylor and Bill Cash. Both were obsessive masters of detail on the creeping federalism of EEC directives. Margaret Thatcher was their most willing
pupil, sitting for hours with them (separately) in her small office as she immersed herself in their tutorials. Her absorption was amazing for its humility and its capacity to tolerate the boredom of the minutiae of EU documents.

A glimpse of her commitment to the Eurosceptic cause and its rebel leaders came in 1991 when Teddy Taylor was awarded a knighthood after thirty-three years of parliamentary service. I hosted a drinks party in my home to celebrate this event. Margaret Thatcher accepted the invitation and inevitably became the star guest of the evening. She made a ringing speech lauding Teddy to the skies ‘for keeping the torch of freedom aloft for so many years’.
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She was also charming to the Taylors’ two teenage sons, George and John, singing their father’s praises to them. To one or two cynical observers it seemed remarkable that the former Prime Minister had taken so long to recognise the virtues of a colleague who had been in her shadow cabinet as early as 1976 but who she had passed over for any kind of promotion or recognition in the intervening years.

The MP who did her the greatest service in the period after the fall was Gerald Howarth, the Member for Cannock and Burntwood. He worshipped Margaret Thatcher. One of his first moves, immediately after her overthrow, was to organise the delivery to Dulwich of a gargantuan bouquet of flowers from the No Turning Back group of Thatcherites. On the day when she was feeling catastrophically unloved, being bunched by a group of admiring young back-benchers counted with her.

Gerald Howarth was a shrewd operator. He knew how to handle both the political instincts and the feminine instincts of Margaret Thatcher. As her appointed PPS, he used both skills to bring her into contact with younger MPs she barely knew.

Politically, she was like a great ship without an anchor as she navigated the unfamiliar waters of the back benches in 1991–1992. She knew the course she wanted to steer – as far as possible away from Brussels without demanding withdrawal from the EEC – but she had little or no idea of how to impose discipline on herself or on her new crew. The result was unhappy chaos, as almost any discontented Tory MP was welcomed on board as a ‘Thatcherite’. This label, which had once meant a principled belief in free markets, strict control of public expenditure, upholding the rule of law and firm moral values, began to look like the skull and crossbones flag of rebellious right-wing malcontents.
As individuals, they proclaimed fealty to their wounded queen over the water. However, as Tory MPs, it was far from clear how much distance they and she wanted to keep from the government headed by her chosen successor.

Her speeches in the House of Commons as a back-bencher were rare but high-voltage events. She declared outward support for John Major, describing him as ‘a leader of vision’,
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but created the impression that she would be much more robust than he was likely to be in keeping Britain out of the single currency and preserving national sovereignty. These confusing signals narrowly managed to keep within the boundaries of political propriety and loyalty.

With a general election looming in the spring of 1992, the potential Thatcherite splinter group of the Conservative parliamentary party closed ranks with the Major government. The only issue where the splintering continued to hurt concerned the question of whether or not to hold a referendum before the forthcoming Maastricht Treaty was approved.

In the spring of 1992, making an unprecedented move for an ex-prime minister, Margaret Thatcher actively encouraged and supported the Private Member’s Bill of Richard Shepherd, designed to require certain treaties to be ratified by a national referendum.

Richard Shepherd was one of the Eurosceptic back-benchers who found themselves admired by Margaret Thatcher after her fall, even though they had been ignored by her while she was in power. So he approached her to see if she would be willing to support his bill. He was trying to make it compulsory for the government to hold a national referendum before future international treaties involving changes to the British constitution could be ratified. This was a thinly veiled pre-emptive strike against the impending Maastricht Treaty.

Thirteen months after her defenestration from Downing Street, the former Prime Minister was feeling guilty about not having done enough to halt the momentum towards full European union. So she asked to be sent an advance copy of Richard Shepherd’s bill and invited him to come and discuss it with her. He recalled:

I went to see her in the room she had been allocated in the House. I was shocked to discover how badly a former Prime Minister was being treated. Her office was on the lower ministerial corridor. It was smaller than a small bathroom, cramped and uncomfortable. The sole sign that she had been head of the government for eleven years was a policeman perched on a chair outside the door. When I went in, the only space to sit
down was on a small sofa that I shared with her. She was holding a copy of my bill which she had annotated in detail.

Huddled together on the sofa with the lucky winner of the Private Member’s ballot, the former Prime Minister said she very much approved of his bill but had detailed questions about the drafting of certain sections. ‘I remember her saying about one particular clause that it was far too open’, recalled Richard Shepherd. ‘She urged me to get it tightened up saying, “You can’t trust anybody”.’
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The bill had no chance of reaching the statute book because it was too controversial and had arrived too late in the truncated session shortly before Parliament was to be prorogued for the impending general election. Nevertheless it was debated for five hours. Margaret Thatcher sat in her new place below the gangway listening to the entire proceedings which ended in a vote. Because the bill could not proceed further, the division was a purely symbolic rebellion, attended on a quiet Friday afternoon only by friends of Richard Shepherd and fans of the referendum he was championing.

As I fell into both categories, I was in the rebel lobby, along with a mere forty-three colleagues. Margaret Thatcher was the most prominent supporter of this bill, whose purposes were the opposite of the government’s. It was the last vote she ever cast in the House of Commons. This made it, in a small way, an historic occasion. More ominously, it was a warning sign that she might be about to become an outright saboteur of John Major’s government and its policies.

SABOTAGING HER SUCCESSOR

The referendum question was the first of many issues on which Margaret Thatcher became a thorn in the flesh of her successor, John Major.

Supporting Richard Shepherd’s bill was an early pinprick. A worse one came when she publicly condemned the Prime Minister for being ‘arrogant’
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in his refusal to declare his backing to a pre-Maastricht referendum. This was ironic for two reasons. First, because her use of language sounded ridiculous, attacking the mild-mannered Major for the offence of political hubris, of which she had been the worst of sinners. Second, because her intervention torpedoed the
prospects for a referendum, which the new Prime Minister would otherwise have supported.

As John Major recalled in an interview for this biography:

‘From the early 1990s I wanted to make a public commitment to hold a referendum if any future government wanted to join the Euro,’ said John Major. But I faced problems with this: several Members of the Cabinet were deeply opposed to a referendum as a matter of principle. That had once been Margaret’s position. Now, her fierce opposition to the Euro made her favour such a move. But – ironically – her advocacy provoked strong opposition in the Cabinet, thus making agreement to a referendum even more difficult. This was not a unique problem: her strident views on Europe made decisions about a number of other European policy issues infinitely more difficult.
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The difficulties became worse because of the style as well as the substance of her attacks on her successor. Egged on by sycophants in the press and in her new parliamentary fan club, she became recklessly indiscreet. I recall a dinner in the home of John Aspinall in late 1991 when she openly mocked John Major as ‘A puir wee bairn’ and ‘the boy from Coldharbour Lane’. She accused him of ‘having no courage and no backbone’. He was ‘hell-bent on destroying the legacy I left him’.
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Many such derisive sneerings found their way into the press.

It was clear that some of this criticism was close to irrational. For example, she fulminated against the compassionate but minor policy of paying compensation to haemophiliacs who had been infected with HIV as a result of contaminated blood transfusions supplied by the NHS. On a larger canvas, she was furious that Michael Heseltine was brought back into the cabinet. She even railed against the inevitable decision to halt the poll tax and revert to a much more equitable version of the Community Charge. But her two greatest battles of overt opposition to the government were over Bosnia and Maastricht.

As the ethnic violence in the republics of former Yugoslavia worsened, Margaret Thatcher championed the cause of Western military intervention to oppose the Serbian excesses and atrocities, particularly in Bosnia. The Major government – and for a long while the Clinton administration – rejected her advice on the grounds that the West should avoid getting dragged into a Balkan civil war. But in the end, Margaret Thatcher’s view was largely vindicated. The Serbs only stopped their horrific practice of ethnic cleansing because the deployment of US military power brought them to the negotiating table and the Dayton Agreement in 1995.